"It is plain then that these Persons by designing totally to suppress the Stage, which is the only encouragement that we have in these Islands of Poetry, manifestly intended to drive out so noble and useful an Art from among us, and by that means endeavour'd with all their might to weaken the pow...

"Nay, wise Men and great Philosophers, have accounted it as the Archet or Musical Bow of the Mind. And certainly it is most true, and as it were a Secret of Nature, that the Minds of Men are more patent to Affections, and Impressions Congregate than Solitary."

"For the Spirits being set in a violent emotion, and the Imagination being fir'd by that agitation; and the Brain being deeply penetrated by those Impressions, the very Objects themselves are set as it were before us, and consequently we are sensible of the same Passion that we should feel from t...

"But as soon as Religion was sufficiently imprinted in the Minds of Men, and they had leisure to Treat of Human things in their writings they invented Prose, and invented it in Imitation of Verse, as Strabo tells us in the first Book of his Geography; but after that Prose was invented by them; ne...

"Superstition, and Despair of Eternal Salvation are wont to imprint on the sensitive Soul, the Blood and Body, in a manner the like affects of Melancholy, as Love and Jealousie, tho' some way after a different manner of affecting; for in the former, the Object whose getting or loss is in danger, ...

"In those kinds of affects, the Corporeal Soul being carryed away, as it were by Violence, both Divorces it self from the Body, and being modified according to the Character of the Idea imprinted, is wont to take a New Species, either Angelical, or Diabolical; mean while the Understanding, inasmu...

"Mars, Pallas, Bacchus, and Hercules, have each of them furnished very good similes in their time, and made, doubtless, a greater impression on the mind of a heathen, than they have on that of a modern reader."

"Mars, Pallas, Bacchus, and Hercules, have each of them furnished very good similes in their time, and made, doubtless, a greater impression on the mind of a heathen, than they have on that of a modern reader."